great blue heron

alternate title: Greening Becomes Thee.

We’ve been having a showery spring.  Nothing could be more normal in pennsylvania, but here in california it’s an anomaly.  Between the showers and the Wallace stevens reading, I’m thinking of pennsylvania all the time.  I’ve even copied a page from a road atlas of southeastern penna, to hang on the wall so I can contemplate it.

Here in the bay area, instead of california yellow and brown, everything is still pennsylvania GREEN, only intenser.  When I first moved here I missed pennsylvania’s lush green vegetation, and I just couldn’t connect until I started hiking in the yellow eastbay hills, with their greyed-greens in summer and fall, and got used to the dry silent feel of them.  I got to know the buckeye tree, the madrone and manzanita, and I started to do better.  I could see the ocean from ridge-line ‘skyview trail’ in Tilden Park.  Then we started going out to the desert, and strangely enough, I knew I had come home. 

Yet it is a home so different from the green and dark brown world of southeastern pennsylvania.  I feel like pennsylvania lines my interior, it’s something deep and archaic inside me, it’s my past and the past of my ancestors.  Just like the rock and soil around wissahickon creek dates from the pre-cambrian period, it's something really ancient, primal and ancestral.  That history is spun into the deepest threads of my being from day one, pre-birth. Yes, it's all those experiences of breath, and taste and feel, but it's also what I think about, it's what I've made of it inside myself.

And so california is something new that I’m experiencing now.  It’s a new history, a new story, a whole new flavor and smell, an acquired taste I would say, as I had no desire to come here originally. I was experiencing a sensory / spiritual attraction to Pennsylvania.  But california is a sort of aesthetic treat, in a way.  Everything’s different: there’s so much sun and dry wind and spacious non-humid air, alternating seasonally with a rainy world.  There are so many plants that are new to me: eucalyptus, monterey pine, camphor trees, coastal redwoods.  To paraphrase a quotation from christopher isherwood:  ‘california offers a landscape not connected with my neurosis,’  so perhaps that’s how I can see things more clearly here.  I don't know, because, after all, it's still me.  It's still my story.  It's just nature that feels different.

This unusually showery period has got all of us who are here from ‘somewhere else originally,’ (my immediate neighbors are from New York, Florida, Missouri, Michigan, Louisiana and Ireland, with only two California natives among us), feeling as if we’re living in two worlds at once, or in two time periods, at least.  Half-oregon, half-pennsylvania.

My bank teller tells me her yard is just a big puddle, and if it doesn’t stop raining soon, she’s going to get a canoe. 

My first client of the day told me he believes our climate is changing.

And almost as if to prove the point, this morning we sighted a Great Blue Heron on the rooftop next door, in our residential, hillside neighborhood.

Comments

[Saroja]

I love this! Yes, living near the ocean is like being able to sit in Mother's lap whenever you want to! What Grace!
I love that quote from Christopher Isherwood. I haven't heard his name mentioned in such a long time! What are you reading of his?
This book, Gaia's Garden, a guide to home-scale permaculture by Toby Hemenway, has captured my imagination! The whole book is a dream of mine come true! Someday! Now!!! We just keep hacking those berries which I noticed you admire! for their green! Wow! I'll have to go and look at the suckers instead of murdering them!! Here in No.CA by Eureka they grow over EVERYTHING! sometimes with stems the size round of a silver dollar!
The Great Blue Heron is so magnificent. Whenever I get a "visitation" I know I have been blessed and because in Native American culture the GBHeron is Self Confidence! She always shows up to remind me to give that to myself. Wow! She must be looking for a nesting place?
Lots of Luck with this new site!
Nice talking with you!

[karen]

thanks for writing S-woman, i think you should definitely start your own GARDENING blog, and keep us apprised of the weather where you are, too. About the brambles - we usually cut them back, but G-man is harboring a fantasy that these are raspberries, so he's waiting to see...in the meantime they just gave me the best opportunity for an intensely green photo. I also confess to really loving to eat the berries. Ah, well, we can't all be perfect. Did you read about the laupes?

[lora]

Pretty nice site, wants to see much more on it!h

[lora]

This is a great tutorial thanks!c

[asdf]

Excellent web site I will be visiting often.e

[Bush]

Excellent site - do keep up the good work.f